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Zoë Steiner and Sandro Rosta in an episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.Michael Gibson/Paramount+/Supplied
You remember Degrassi: The Next Generation, of course.
Well, here comes as close as television will ever get to Degrassi: Deep Space Nine.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which releases its first two episodes on Thursday on Paramount+, is a young-adult school soap crossed with a space opera primarily anchored in one spot.
Set in the 32nd century into which Discovery controversially time-jumped, the latest Star Trek small-screen spin-off sees the Federation continuing to rebuild after an event called The Burn.
All you really need to know is that the Federation is restarting its Starfleet Academy, where young cadets once boldly prepared to go where no one had gone before.
The series follows the first class to return to the academy’s San Francisco campus in 120 years – though students also spend much of their time on a teaching ship called the USS Athena.
Holly Hunter stars as chancellor Nahla Ake, a 422-year-old half-Lanthanite with a hippie-ish vibe. She likes to walk around in her bare feet and curl up in the Athena’s captain’s chair like the host of a sex podcast.
Nahla’s pet student is a human named Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), a teenage outlaw and hacker about whom she feels guilty for having played a role in separating from his mother (Tatiana Maslany) 15 years earlier.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy kicks off with a mini-movie that explains this backstory – and allows the academy’s new student body to bond when, on the way to Earth aboard the Athena, they run afoul of a big baddie played by Paul Giamatti with altogether too much zeal.
Caleb’s fellow students include hot young specimens of new humanoid species: Darem (George Hawkins), a full-of-himself posh British-accented Khionian from a well-to-do background, and Genesis (Bella Shepard), a Dar-Sha student with a bedazzled complexion and weighed down by family’s legacy.
Additionally, there’s Jay-Den (Karim Diané), a studious Klingon who shamefully yearns for a valiant life, rather than a valiant death; and Sam (Kerrice Brooks), a hologram who, pointlessly but nevertheless entertainingly, has been programmed to be an overeager teenager.
Familiar faces on the USS Athena are Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno, Discovery’s engineer who’s now teaching physics with a side of Oscar Wilde, and Robert Picardo’s holographic Doctor, who first appeared in Voyager and whose appearance has aged, he explains with delicious dryness, “to put organics at ease.” (Naturally, he leads the extracurricular opera club.)
Star Trek needed a new format that wasn’t built around a ship – and Starfleet Academy’s educational setting allows the franchise to lean into its enduring themes of scientific and intercultural curiosity, and a penchant for progressive moralism in an honest way.
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From left to right, George Hawkins, Kerrice Brooks, and Sandro Rosta in an episode Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.John Medland/Paramount+/Supplied
The Starfleet Academy shares its campus and is involved in an escalating prank feud with the War Academy (the head of which is nicely incarnated by Raoul Bhaneja, one of a number of Canadians in the supporting cast of the Toronto-shot production.)
In contrasting the students who’ve immersed themselves in the study of the humanities – and Klingonities and Vulcanities, I suppose – with those pursuing a more practical trade, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy provides a much-needed defence of them at a time when they are under attack.
In the character of Caleb, we see a mind being broadened in real time – and a veiled argument for looking beyond marks in admissions in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in higher learning. (I thought it was quite clever to have a human be the show’s example of the value of having a diverse student body that looks at more than test scores.)
The Starfleet Academy is not exactly depicted as a stereotypically “woke” institution, mind you. Chancellor Nahla’s philosophy – echoing those of podcasters Mel Robbins and Jordan Peterson – emphasizes the importance of making your bed in the morning and showing up on time.
While the characters in the show learn the benefits of discipline, the creators behind them still haven’t quite. This is one of those streaming shows where episodes creep over the 60-minute mark making every one seem like a bit of a mini-movie – or at least the first flabby ones that I sampled for this review.
But it’s certainly not the loathsome travesty those Trekkers who have been nursing their hatred of Beverly Crusher’s teenage son Wesley on The Next Generation for 30 years feared.
Indeed, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy makes a strong first impression and fully justifies current franchise head honcho Alex Kurtzman’s decision to jump to the far future – allowing for storytelling not bogged down by an overlarded mythology, which should get a new generation of viewers to beam aboard.
